How Most SEO Agencies Get It Wrong

seo agencies

When I came across the first incident, I thought it was a kind of overlook but when I inspected the website further, I came to the conclusion that either these guys were crazy or they didn’t know what they were doing. They offer SEO services but their very own website was not ranking for any search engine optimization related keyword, not even in the local searches. This is outrageous. It was all because of the “getting it wrong” stuff that I finally made up my mind to start my own SEO consulting agency where I will deliver real results. When I do that, I will surely put it here for all to know.

I am going to use this website to express my frustration in dealing with people who think they know something but actually have not the slightest idea about what they do. In this instance, my focus is going to be a couple of digital marketing SEO agencies or say companies who offer organic search engine services in which they are not competent. This may come as a surprise. The natural thing is to believe that a digital marketing company should have a solid grasp on the mechanics of search engine optimization. Let me disappoint you, it is not always the case. I have seen it and that is why I always say that “half knowledge is very dangerous”. Like “everybody does it so I too do it”.

If I have to list and address every instance of non SEO knowledge among people who own companies that are in online marketing, it might take volumes. I will cite only a few in this article and in chronological order as I experienced the incidents.

Incident 1: Website Audit

how seo agencies conduct website audits
There was or still is this online marketing company in one of the largest cities in the US having very powerful and rich clients. This company has the so called Fortune 500 clients. One of their clients was complaining that their revenue was declining and that they were not getting any leads from the website. I was hired to figure out why the website was not performing and to give recommendations as to how to improve.

Of course as every knowledgeable SEO expert should know, the first thing I did was runs a website audit on the site using one of my preferred tools. On a website with 5 landing pages created with the intention to convert visitors into buyers, 20 blog posts, 1 privacy policy page, an about us page and a contact us page, my tool reported:

  1. Over 200 missing Meta descriptions
  2. More than 80 missing alt attributes warnings
  3. A bunch of broken internal as well as external links.


This is not the whole list. I am just listing a few of them.

Meta Descriptions

As I said, there were more than 200 reported missing Meta descriptions. For such a small website, I thought that was way too much and decided to find out why. Man, was I surprised! The majority of the missing Meta descriptions were related to post tags. I found that the blog posts were over tagged. The least number of tags I discovered was 13 on a single post.

If you are familiar with WordPress, you know that WordPress automatically creates a page for each tag. That was exactly what happened. The first “get it wrong” was somebody in the SEO company thought that they should use all their keywords as tags believing that should make their website visible to the search engines for multiple keywords.

Incident 2: Disavow Links

While I was discussing link building with the owner of the digital marketing company, I constantly heard him saying “disavow links this disavow links that”. He kept repeating it in such a way as if he wanted to impress me that he knew something about link building. It was very evident from the theme of the discussion that he had no idea why and how link disavows are done. He probably heard about it and thought he knew it all.

Incident 3: Weekly Website Audit

We are back to website audit again. This time it was the frequency that was at the center. These people were conducting audits on their clients’ websites on a weekly basis. This is a completely wrong understanding of the process. I thought it was no use trying to convince them. I am not trying to be rude or to be insulting to a group of people, but there is a saying that says “How do you explain the setting of the sun to a blind man?” Food for thought.